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People Trained To Experience an Overlap In Senses Also Receive IQ Boost
Zothecula writes Tasting lemons when they see a number seven, regarding a certain letter as being yellow in color. Not a great deal is known about why some people experience an overlapping of the senses, a phenomena known as synesthesia. But a new study conducted at the University of Sussex has suggested that specific training of the mind can induce the effects of the condition. The study even suggests that such training can boost a person's IQ.
Is the 12-point boost in IQ permanent or does it fade over three months like the primary effects of the training?
It's an interesting result, but nobody should pretend they really know how to interpret it. There could be all kinds of reasons for the measured change. Pulling one hypothesis out of the air, maybe seeing letters in color (I always have) makes you slightly faster and more accurate at reading the questions on IQ tests.
Expecting a sentence and seeing only fragments, not having a proper subject and verb.
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There is a rebranching of the brain circuitry that is linked to a cognitive boost - also being used to experimentally treat dementia and other similar disorders.
So...then...does this count as an endorsement of chemically induced synesthesia?
LSD: Boost your IQ *and* be convinced you're a snake-monkey who can read the secrets of the universe!
Oh, boy. This is gonna be fun...
Does the improvement still happens when facing dissonant stimulus like reading "yellow" in red letters or eating a pear when reading apple? Or if those stimulus change with time?
Reinforcing and making more consistent our vision of the world could make it more predictable and suitable for applying patterns over it, and that is related with IQ. But getting noise or conflicting information could give the opposite effect.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm surprised there aren't more neat tricks like this. I learned to offload some 3D geometric simulations to my subconscious and instantly having it hand back a result. It's complicated but basically you send a request to the part of your brain that's responsible for unconscious generation of realistic objects in dreams and it returns a proper, accurate result without having to consciously make the determination yourself. That's why I can solve problems at superhuman speeds while doing 3D modeling at my work. I'm actually the CIO and they made me part time 3D designer because of that :D
I also heard about techniques that any normal person can do to memorize and entire deck of cards. Someone covering an international memorization competition as a journalist thought he should try it out and then went on to win it the next year, proving anyone can do it.
I should also mention that it's unbelievably easy to learn to speedread. I learned it in one day. I also learned a technique to gain control of and remember all dreams you have. I had mixed success. It's a bit harder. But why are there not more brain tricks like this becoming popular? Most are not even difficult!
Is there some way to simulate synesthesia? Drop acid? I kinda want to try it now.
this training shows a weakness in the method we measure I.Q., or shows that I Q isn't actually that good of a measurement of actual intelligence?
This study is interesting, but I suspect it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The sample group is tiny, and the IQ increase is huge. I think an interesting and fairly easy-to-answer question is: how does the average IQ of large numbers of synesthetes compare to the population at large? I've had the most common form of synesthesia (letters-colors) from my earliest memories. I don't think it was induced by environmental factors like colored magnetic letters. The phenomenon for me is not actually seeing a floating yellow 'A' like on a fridge. It's that 'A' simply IS yellow. Think of it this way: when you perceive the color yellow, you have an aesthetic experience. I have the same aesthetic experience when I perceive the letter 'A'. I enjoy having this condition and it has been helpful to me.
IQ tests are tests of potential in theory; in practice they test achievement as indicators of potential. So, you can simply train up in the exercises used to test IQ. Examples include:
1) Vocabulary expansion. Learn new words! There are many games and self-study programs available for this, and they are all affordable.
2) Practice mental arithmetic.
3) Improve spatial intelligence by learning to draw, sculpt, or similar.
4) Improve processing speed by playing twich-based video games, practicing speed reading, or doing a recreational sport that requires quick thinking.
etc.
I started studying piano 7 years ago (I'd previously been a semi-pro woodwind player). One of the things I noticed was that I was i/o bound reading the highly parallelized piano input stream (two staves w/ multinotes on each) and this interfered with my proprioception (perception of where my limbs and philangeas are in space). Over time,it's gotten a lot easier to read and perceive muscle motion through space. This process started at age 33, and I'm pretty sure it's been more difficult because of that, but I can't help suspecting the forced rewiring of my brain hasn't helped my general learning capacity. You're simultaneously stimulating the visual, aural, and kinesthetic senses in concert for a sustained period during practice.
For a few weeks after I saw the video for All About That Bass I hear that song every time I saw a fat person...
Use creativity and knowledge to see the barrier.
After all - human intelligence is infinite and infinitely malleable. It's all a question of what you want to believe!
Everybody knows Carrots a 6 ..
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
You can probably get a similar effect just playing Portal 2. Near the end of the co-op game, portals were practically an extension of my limbs.